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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

It would be fun to have 'demoscene' for chess engines and AI in general where computers to play chess with very restricted resources.

What is the smallest computer with superhuman cababilities?

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It definitely isn't superhuman by any means, but I was deeply impressed when I learned about microchess, an early computer chess program that managed to run in 1K of ram in the KIM-1 microcomputer. It's a pretty easy program to beat if you play chess regularly. But if you are the kind of person that only plays chess sporadically and non-seriously, it can give a human a run for their money.

With advancements in saved/pretrained models I think answer is or will be a raspberry pi. I think a more interesting question is “what is the smallest computer that can learn chess”

I'm sure there's a smaller computer than a raspberry pi that can beat any human in chess.

It would be interesting to try to do it with the minimum possible power consumption. Would a small power-optimized ARM microcontroller such as an STM32L4 with some bulk storage be sufficient, for example? Could a device pulling < 100 mW beat a human grand master? 10 mW?

The one that beat Kasparov in 1997 could evaluate 200 million positions per second which is quite a lot. On the other hand beating me could probably be done with a modified pocket calculator.

There has been a lot of progress in computer chess software since 1997, the current version of Stockfish is very probably superhuman on a low-end smartphone

I can't find any recent experiment, but here https://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-the-smartphone-vs-des... is a test done in 2014 that shows that smartphones were already clearly superhuman then

In 2019 I estimate we would need less than half of the computing power of that 2014 smartphone to achieve the same playing strength

When I was a kid I had a TI-83+ with a chess engine that could whoop my ass. Zilog z80 at 6MHz, a few KB of ram. Of course, I sucked at chess...

Also: What is the fewest required bits. With modern data based techniques, it's tempting to add a large data file that must be loaded with sunfish. However that kinda feels like cheating.

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